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By late April 2010, I found out that BigCommerce is the best e-commerce software platform so far. This conclusion is based on my own comprehensive review and testing. In fact, my new version of my product sales website Digital Temperature Gauges is going to be on Bigcommerce. Previously I had experimented with other platforms such as ZenCart, Shopify, NopCommerce and Magento. Therefore, I understand the advantages and disadvantages each offers more deeply. So here is a review of how each software application is different and how each one is better than the other.

What Makes A Platform Better than the Other

When I say BigCommerce is the best platform, it’s because I’ve found out that there are some factors and features that make it better than others. Being a professional SEO technician and conversion optimizer, I always look for a platform that can maximize my bottom line. Features that might help in doing so are:

As I said earlier, BigCommerce is one e-commerce application that I found to be the best of all. This is because it offers some outstanding features along with right pricing. These features include:

Integration with third party sites such as Google website Optimizer and Google Analytics

Great SEO

Easy to customize tags, titles and meta tags

Awesome internal navigation

One page simple checkout

Good photo displays with zooming option

Connectivity with Ebay and Facebook

Automated and flexible inventory control

Coupons, discount banners and gift certificates

Easily customizable default designs

Fully hosted solution without any worries about SSL or other IT annoyances

Full CMS-no need to buy HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP

Import and export of multiple products at a time

Accounting system that can sync with Quickbooks, MYOB, Peachtree, etc.

Shipping is also easy and simple

Full business intelligence and performance

Great search functionality such as related search and advance search, pricing, etc.

There was one disadvantage through, and that was that BigCommerce’s Texas based office is not as on point as their Australian based office. Aside from that, everything else was just too good to be true.

Although Shopify is the closest contender of BigCommerce, Bigcommerce really offers deals that are better in terms of price. Though the lowest priced deal on both platforms costs the same, Shopify charges 2% of revenue per month at this pricing level.

Shopify is another good software that I have tried during my e-commerce ventures. I used to be a great fan of Shopify, but now BigCommerce had taken that place. However Shopify still does have great features, which include:

Hosting is abstract

Automatic updating of new software

Setup is quite simple

Default templates

Discount codes

Good support

Yet, the problems I identified in this software were:

They have their own programming language called Liquid, so you need to use that for title and tags

2% of revenue share is not a good way to go for low margin stores

ZenCart: Free but difficult

ZenCart is a more established name in e-commerce. It is free to download. I used it for the older version of Digital Auto Gauge websites. It is kind of outdated now, and I don’t like it personally, so won’t recommend it either. Still some features and benefits are:

It is free to use

Good to start learning but making profit would be difficult

As for its problems:

You will have to take care of the hosting yourself

You have to set up SSL yourself

Payment is through third parties

Poor documentation

Checkout process requires to go through several pages

Accounting system is not integrated

SEO also requires a lot of time

Designing requires a lot of effort and time as well

Magento: Good but not good enough

There are two versions of the Magento shopping cart platform- one is the free community version and the second is a paid one. I’ll be reviewing the free one here.

Among the open source shopping carts, this one is the best one available. The setup is easy and customization is faster.

Some of the great features I found in this one are:

Ease of Deployment

Integration of live Chat

Text messages on sales and contacts

Reporting is good

It’s open source and it’s free

It also has its built-in forum

Some problems:

Support is weak

Self Hosting

Some bugs need to be fixed

Microsoft licensing is required

The results are in: BigCommerce definitely tops the list of best shopping cart platform

I have also researched other shopping cart platforms such as goEmerchant, Fortune3, Corecommerce, Yahoo! Merchant, ProStores, Godaddy Quick Shopping Cart, goEcart, genXpros and Volusion. None of these fall close to any of the above reviewed ones. You can check the above reviewed software yourself. However, BigCommerce is the one that requires to be seriously considered.

I hope that I have made your job easier by this comprehensive review here. But if you still have any kind of question regarding shopping carts and online store building, feel free to ask a question in the comment section.

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The above mentioned shopping carts are great in terms of their unique functionality. There are few cart are not very popular but they are very good with respect the above list. As an example iqecommerce is very good because -Instant setup. No software to install. Upload your products and start selling! I am loving it ! Anyway, Thanks for sharing a great list with us.

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It’s been a while since you reviewed a nopCommerce. Now it has more features and also have professional support services available apart from numbers of professional development company offering services on it. Moreover, it can be now deployed with few clicks on Windows Cloud Computing platform – Windows Azure.. and soon it will have more features. We have just published an article on nopCommerce 3.0 Review focusing on Multi Store & Multi Vendor, I welcome you to write your review about same at http://www.nopaccelerate.com/nopcommerce-3-0-multi-store-and-multi-vendor-review/ Thanks for sharing this great article with us.

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